She recognized it, the slight lean into the question, the deliberate ease of it. It was a trap laid with perfect charm, which was, she supposed, the most fitting kind.
“No.”
“No?”
“I do not find you charming,” she said crisply. “I find you aware of your charm, which is a different thing entirely and considerably less appealing. A man who knows exactly how he appears and deploys it accordingly is not charming; he iscalculated. And I would not,” she added, with the decisive confidence she had been meaning to deliver since the drawing room in Brighton, “ever fall for a man as shallow as you choose to appear.”
She watched the wordshallowland hard. Watched the amusement leave his face. What replaced it was a cooler, more composed expression that she had not yet seen on him and that made him look entirely different.
When he spoke, his voice was level and devoid of warmth, leaving her with a chill. “Then we are fortunate that you feel so.”
A pause.
“My wife,” he continued, “will be the last woman I make any effort to charm. What exists between us exists on paper and in public and nowhere else, and I have no interest in complicating it.”
He held her gaze with firm steadiness. “You are free to live exactly as you choose, Duchess. I only ask that you perform what the arrangement requires and nothing more.” He paused once more. “As will I.”
He moved back to his desk with the same unhurried ease, picked up his quill, and returned his attention to the papers in front of him with a completeness that suggested she was no longer the primary subject of his thoughts and had not been made to feel that she was.
She stood by the wall for a moment.
I am not frightened of him.
No, she was not frightened. She was standing in his study, on her wedding day, with her back against the wall and the slight chill of a conversation that had been warm a moment ago and was now decidedly not, and she was not frightened.
She was something else entirely, something that had no clean name and that she was not prepared to examine in his presence.
“Goodnight, Duke.” Her voice came out steadier than she deserved credit for.
He glanced up from the papers. “Goodnight.”
She left.
In the corridor, with the study door closed behind her and the house settling quietly around her into its evening rhythms, Cecily leaned against the wall for a moment and thought about the wordshallow,which she had said on purpose and which had done exactly what she’d intended.
She thought about why it had, for approximately three seconds, felt like a mistake.
She pushed off the wall and went to find Mrs. Eldridge.
* * *
“…and then Mrs. Eldridge said the cat had no business being in the linen cupboard, but the cat had very clearly formed a different opinion on the matter, and I said–”
“Letitia.” Isadora sat back in her chair. “You are going to knock over the cream.”
“I am not going to knock over the–” The cream listed alarmingly to the left. Letitia righted it with the reflex of long experience and continued without pause. “As I was saying, I told Mrs. Eldridge that if the cat had chosen the linen cupboard, that was rather more a comment on the linen than on the cat, and she did not appreciate that observation at all, which I thought was…”
Cecily, who had been sitting across the table for approximately seven minutes and had already discovered that breakfast at Blackmoor House was a considerably livelier affair than breakfast anywhere else she had ever been, pressed her lips together against a smile and reached for the teapot.
The breakfast room was well-lit and south-facing, which she approved of, with tall windows that let the morning in properly rather than suggesting it from a cautious distance.
The table was set with the quiet precision of a well-run house—silver laid correctly, bread already sliced, the butter dish in its place—and yet there was something in the room that resistedthe formality of it, some warmth that persisted despite the good silver and the pressed tablecloths.
She thought it might be the sisters, who occupied formal spaces with the cheerful disregard of people who had grown up in them and had long since stopped being impressed.
“You told Mrs. Eldridge,” Isadora said, with careful emphasis as though reconstructing an incident she had not witnessed but had clearly heard about extensively, “that the cat’s aesthetic preferences reflected poorly on the household linen.”
“I told her the cat hadopinions,” Letitia emphasized, with dignity. “There is a difference.”
